Black and white is the new colour

This is old tech really. Looking for new things to try I came across discussions of trichromy – combining three monochrome shots taken with different colour filters to create a colour image. A particularly fascinating proponent was Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who travelled around the Russin empire in the 1900s documenting the country and people using glass plate negatives taken using colour filters, designed to be projected through filters to display in colour. This is also how Technicolor worked back in the 1930s, especially for Disney animations.

So I went on and built a new camera to test it out. I used 35mm film and three pinholes, fitting three 24mm square frames in the space of two normal 35mm frames. I got some lighting gel samples from Lee Filters and used little squares of these in front of the pinholes. First results were okay – although the internals of the camera need a bit of work to prevent the adjacent images overlapping, they proved the principle. Albeit with an added 3d effect because of parallax.

So then I built a 6×12 format camera with a filter wheel included. this works pretty well as you can see here, but is pretty inefficient when it comes to film (2 full colour pics per roll!).